Nadine Dorries is wrong (again)

It's with little surprise that I read Nadine Dorries latest blog postand concluded that she is stupid and wrong.

It's all about the Tories confused and frankly pointless marriage tax credits policy and this time she really out does herself, defending Cameron's botch job of a policy.

She starts by saying...

It is a statistical and evidence based fact that couples who are married try harder at keeping a family together

No it isn't, what is statistical and evidence based is the fact that less people who are married break up. That's a totally different thing. She's got the causal relationship the wrong way round, people who are married break up less not because they've made the commitment, but because they are in more stable relationships regardless of the commitment. You could argue that Dorries point is correct, but it isn't based on evidence and statistics.

Only 1:11 married couples split before their child’s fifth birthday whereas that figure is 1:3 for co-habiting couples.

Again a case of 'lies, damn lies, and statistics.' The age of five seems to have been plucked from the air, and what follows is even worse...

Sadly, when marriage or relationship breakdown occurs, it is often the children who are caught in the middle. Would any child, when asked the question ‘would you prefer it if your mum and dad stayed together rather than split up’, answer ‘no’? 

What she says in the second part seems to directly contradict the first. In many cases the parents divorcing may be the best thing for the kids, if the parents are creating a bad environment with the bad feeling towards each other. A quite pointless over generalisation based on spurious evidence.

Even those children in dysfunctional families still love both parents and the fact that the "togetherness" of two parents provides them with double the security and parenting.

In most cases the parents don't care or parent any less when they have got divorced. In fact many make more of an effort to try to overcome the barriers of divorce.

We are all aware of the problems we face in the society within which we live today.

Yes, there are some bad things going on in society. I'm sure you won't over-generalise or scaremonger though.

Having spent a week on a council estate, where marriage is not even a part of the vocabulary, where literally thousands of single mums fail to control teenage boys and where stabbings, shootings, drugs and all level of general crime are a part of the fabric of council estate life, I am even more resolved in my own commitment to the fact that we absolutely have to return to the values which we know once kept our society stable and law abiding.

Was I being too hopeful? I think so. 'Marriage isn't even part of the vocabulary!' Now that's just plain bollocks. This is starting to read like an article from the Daily Mail. Especially with the harking back to the golden era where everything was fine and nothing bad ever happened to anyone.

If not least because it’s those who struggle to bring up a family and do the decent thing that pick up the bill for the rest.

Oh, 'doing the decent thing' again. What are single mothers whose husbands have left them supposed to do? Struggle along on their own as not to burden everyone else?

That bill may be financial, as we all have to pay extra taxes to fund the benefit system, the police, social services, security within schools, and the entire public service cost of a society in meltdown, or for some people the cost is more personal and real.

'Society in meltdown!!!' Stop being so fucking melodramatic Nadine.

My law abiding hard working constituent, who was attacked in London on New Years Eve by a youth who had no father he knew of and had been released from a young offenders institute just before Christmas, has some very strong opinions on this.

'law abiding hard working'... God this is starting to sound like a Littlejohn column, Not all people on benefits commit crime.

The values which we know provide the framework for a decent and law abiding society have to be championed once again. I’m delighted that David Cameron has picked up the gauntlet and I know that if he becomes Prime Minister we will at the end of his first five years be able to look at the family and say, ‘yes, it’s in a much stronger place than it was five years ago’, and that has to be a good thing for us all.

Bollocks.